At Home, but Not Alone

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Pound for pound, Macaulay Culkin is the biggest star in Hollywood. Weighing in at a ton less than Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 11-year-old nevertheless is in possession of one of the prized titles of the business: Home Alone, the third highest grossing movie of all time. (Only E.T. and Star Wars have made more money.) The 1990 film has transformed him from a precocious if mischievous New York City child actor into a heavyweight pop icon -- with the negotiating clout to match. And at the moment, no one dares say no to the kid.

Who can resist him? Mouth agape, face slapped between his hands, Culkin's visage is America's home-sweet-home version of Edvard Munch's The Scream, with the angst pasteurized. In the just-released My Girl, a story about a motherless, hypochondriac tomboy and her best friend Thomas J. (Culkin), he does the unspeakable for a preadolescent (has his first screen kiss) and the unthinkable for a budding megastar (dies well before the end). "It was easy," says Mack. "I just pretended I was sleeping." It could turn out to be the most talked-about movie death since a hunter shot Bambi's mother.

Culkin bobs and weaves around the celebrity circuit like a pro. He opens Michael Jackson's new Black or White video. He is allowed to stay up past his bedtime not to watch but to host Saturday Night Live. Culkin, who was paid only $250,000 for Home Alone, received $1 million for his role in My Girl. Now whatever Mack wants, Mack gets -- video games, trips to Florida, multimillion dollar movie and merchandising deals.

The dealmaking, of course, remains in the hands of Culkin's agents -- and his father, former actor Kit Culkin. Mack seems oblivious to his box-office worth, playing pranks on his teachers and giving his favorite answer to most interview questions: "Maybe." As for his future, he doesn't give it much thought. Says he: "I think about, like, tomorrow we get to leave school early. We leave early on Tuesdays and Fridays." But this is a little boy whom major studios desperately want in their futures -- at almost any price.

To deliver Mack for the sequel to Home Alone, which is now before the cameras, Kit Culkin reportedly extracted from 20th Century-Fox a contract worth $5 million, and a guarantee of $2.5 million for a cast-against-type part for his son in a thriller, The Good Son. Written by Ian McEwan (The Cement Garden, The Innocent), The Good Son is about good and evil doppelganger siblings. The money will be paid out whether or not the film, which has the boy playing the psychotic brother, gets made. Did the elder Culkin want The Good Son because Mack already has too many cute-little-boy roles? "If it's different, he seems to respond to it," says Dad. "You do what you can to keep it all going for him."

But there was just one little problem: The Good Son, which began as a $6 million project four years ago, was just two weeks away from shooting in Maine. The decision from on high in the studio spun the production team into chaos. Because Mack was committed to Home Alone 2 until the spring, The Good Son had to be pushed back into late next year, forcing the film over budget -- without even calculating the child actor's salary. But hey, as Fox chairman Joe Roth told the New York Times, "There are no 11-year-old kids who sell tickets like Macaulay. To get the kid in a lead part, that's a great asset. Look, if Joe Blow were cast in a movie and Mel Gibson is suddenly available in nine months, you wait nine months."

Sources close to the set of The Good Son describe the resulting attempts to beat back this encroachment on the movie's original scheme as the equivalent of trying to punch through a granite wall with bare fists. A number of emissaries to Kit Culkin failed to change his mind. At one point John Hughes, who directed Mack in Home Alone, reportedly tried to intervene, offering Mack another movie of "Oscar caliber" if the father would relent. No way. The Good Son's director, Michael Lehmann (Heathers, Hudson Hawke), quit in exasperation. He had not been satisfied by Macaulay's readings, allegedly saying, "He cannot act." Say the sources: "We have heard from other people he has worked with, from casting directors, that Mack just mimics. He does single clauses. And that isn't what this movie needs."

What Mack has, however, is mesmerizing film presence. As Howard Zieff, his director on My Girl, notes, "When he's doing the scene live, it seems like a straight reading. So we were always surprised, when we looked at the dailies, at how much he was giving. He's one of those lucky actors the camera loves. He just has his own technique; what comes out of him is straight Mack." To Mack, taking time out from playing Spider-Man on his Sega Genesis machine, acting is "simple." He explains: "I just pretend I'm that person. I like pretending."

A new director is being sought for The Good Son, and the script is being rewritten to highlight Mack's charms and star qualities. Nevertheless, is it possible that between now and the end of shooting on Home Alone 2, Mack and his father might fancy still another movie project and drop out of The Good Son, possibly preventing that movie from ever getting to the screen? As Mack might say: maybe.

With reporting by Linda Williams/New York